On the way to Rugeyo
The day starts pretty early. By the time my colleague and I eat breakfast – usually a crepe-thin omelet and a chunk of hard white wonder bread – many people in Kabarondo, the village where we’re spending our nights, have already started their days. Women walk with large baskets of bananas trying to find some eager buyers, men ride bikes on both sides of the street carrying almost anything from people to large potato sacks of carrots on the back rack, while stray chickens try and stay out of the way. People congregate in groups waiting for the local transport to come hoping one of the trucks driving by will give them lift. (I know this because we stopped to by bananas from a lady who was standing with a group who were quite insistent that the CARE truck should give them a ride.)
Our destination every morning so far has been Rugeyo – a small village established recently in an area that used to be part of Akagera National Park. A particularly remote part of the village has been erected very recently when the Tanzanian government kicked out all Rwandan refugees in the western part of their country. In 2006, almost 15,000 Rwandans were forced back over the border, leaving their property and everything they had worked for in Tanzania behind. Many people were even born in Tanzania, as their parent left Rwanda in 1959 when the first expulsion of Tutsis happened, but were expelled nonetheless.
The roads leading to Rugeyo seem to just get bumpier the closer you get. If you relax into it, it can be a really great massage. The way there is mostly dirt roads that wind and twist around many hills and bits of settled communities and are definitely the dustiest routes I’ve experienced in the country. When another vehicle passes going the other way, you almost have to slow down for half a minute to wait for the burnt orange cloud to settle.
During the last leg, we’ve often stopped to take pictures of gazelles, monkeys and even the three hippos that live in the nearby lake – the main water source for drinking, washing and constructing mud bricks for house for the residents who live on the edge of Rugeyo.
… Details of the village life and profiles of the people who live in it coming soon…
On the way back is when all of the chlldren in Rugeyo proper seem to be out. Barreling through the village in a Toyota 4X4 whizzing by their lives at a speed faster then the villagers have ever known, we might as well be in a space ship. Looking out the window, I see the kids drop whatever they’re doing and coming running to the sound of an engine.
“Hiyeee! Hiyeee!” they shout, with both hands waving furiously.
But soon they see that there’s another reason to look.
There’s a muzungu (white person) in the car.
I’ve gotten used to people remarking about the colour of my skin in Kigali. But it’s usually in a subtle way, like everything just being more expensive for myself and my Rwandan friends with me.
But driving through such a rural place I feel like a celebrity. After the kids drop whatever they’re doing, and run to the side of the road, they started jumping up and down and pushing each other screaming “umuzungu!, umuzungu!”
A posse of kids looks like a bunch of circles staring in amazement, their pie-shaped eyes matching the movements of their mouths when they say it: ooh-mooh-zoon-goo!
And if they yell loud enough one group of kids tips off the other and they get a head start to the side of the road. Driving through the village ends up sounding like a vertiginous stream of kids echoing the same word at different times.
There’s nothing I can do but smile and wave like the queen.
